Insights by Danielle Fong

2022-Nov 2025

i often describe

@lightcellenergy as building portable dyson spheres. harnessing the power of spectrally pure, chemically fueled, man made stars.

and it’s remarkable that within just a few months of starting experiments, we started achieving brightnesses greater than the sun ever shines on earth. (note, in large part because it is 1/600,000th of our sky — a limitation that our lightcells, our “dyson spheres” do not have, wrapping around our emitter.)

within a few months, in a garden shed in Canada, we achieved over 3 suns, over 300,000 nits (cd/m^2).

within a few more months, in our lab in San Francisco, Jon, Steve and I achieved almost 7 suns, 670,000 nits.

albeit destructively to the apparatus! at temperatures that eroded our cutting torch, our salt supply, our quartz tubes, or cracked. our sapphire. but this was in 2023!

to a large extent, the development over the past couple of years, from mid 2023, to 2024, and all this year, was a steady effort to invent and develop, in some cases for the first time, for any team on earth, a materials stack, and everything relevant to to, to make high temperature parts for (a) continuous operation, and (b) that could tolerate the extreme temperatures and chemical environment necessary to vaporize and condense salt, in a continuous cycle, with no moving parts.

we basically continuously tried the stupidest thing that could possibly work.

some things, like “use table salt” worked out amazingly well — though they had knock on requirements, like now you have to reform and condense sodium chloride in heat exchangers other things,

we tried all the stupidest things we could think of, until we ran out of stupid things to try. Then we had to start trying clever things. Like, the material that we chose, alumina, which can handle the molten NaCl, and the temperature, and will not further oxidize, since it is already an oxide, is super hard, as in high stiffness. It has finite thermal expansion. You must therefore relieve the thermal expansion via curvature. You can ONLY POSSIBLY survive thermal gradients and cycles through curvature. This will requires you pioneering a field. Roll up your sleeves.

It has been an epic journey getting this far! Of course, it is yet unwritten if @lightcellenergy can even complete it, much less by the end of the year, but, i can certainly set a medium term goal:

more than 1,000,000 nits (cd/m^2, or ~1kw/m^2). brighter than any firework.

maybe achieved by New Years? that will be a hell of a firework, and a beautiful omen.
1000x brighter than HDR, 10x brighter than 1kW/m^2, 10 suns, the max brightness of a Sun, incident on the Earth’s surface

here’s the twist: it would now not be cheating to use recuperation AND oxygen enrichment if you’re burning green hydrogen from electrolysis, since you can set up to hold on the oxygen.

it’s for this reason, and many more that I’m excited to welcome my heroes, @TerraformIndies / @CJHandmer to @lightcellenergy‘s SAFE and Cap Table. We’re building the Yin to @TerraformIndies‘ Yang of abundant hydrogen and synthetic fuels.

We are excited to work on both the technology and the multi megascale to gigascale development sites — energy campuses, power centers — to build revolutionary, cost effective proving grounds for synthetic fuels and energy technology. Thank you so much. We are empowered and inspired by your belief and investment in us. We will make it count

Thank you again, as well, very much, to our many investors who we have not yet tagged, and will tag, on our THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING US ON SAFES WHILE WE WERE JUST A DREAM post, soon to come. Hope to paint funding announcements in a new, golden light!

Follow us on Twitter / X. @lightcellenergy, @daniellefong